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Comment by bgribble | Hacker News Reader

The hype gets pushed down from the C-suite because prospects are always asking "are you doing anything with ${latest}?" and the salesdroid has to answer "of course! we'll be showing a teaser in the next couple of months".

Then it gets pushed up from the bottom by engineers practicing Resume-Driven Development. Everybody perks up when a project using ${latest} gets mentioned in the CTO's office. Wouldn't it look cool to say I was a pioneer in ${latest}?

When it's being pushed from the top and the bottom, it's gonna happen.

Left out of the process is thoughtful/imaginative product design and innovation. Sometimes it happens but it's more of an accident in most cases.

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I worked in Google for 9 years and even up at the director level there was no way to avoid this.

You either contradicted it and got defunded, slowed it to apply it appropriately and got removed from the project due to not appear ambitious enough, or you went full speed on prematurely scaling an application of it and inevitable failed at scale.

I did founding work on the Google assistant and I was caught in this exact conundrum. There was no solution.

I spent time at Google and found this to be the case as well. I think the only "cure" for this is good upper management that is isn't swayed by the flavor of the moment hype, and also a culture of being monomaniacally product-focused.

Places that are intensely product-focused aren't immune from frothy hype, but at least it's forced through the critical filter of "ok but what does this do for our product really", which is a vital part of separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to new ideas.

My main beef with Google is that the company's culture is intensely not product-focused. The company's defined by its origin story of a groundbreaking technology that happened upon product-market fit, and it's pathologically unable to do the opposite: start with a clear-eyed product vision and working backwards to the constituent technologies.

Maybe a minor tangent, but I really enjoyed playing with Google Assistant when it first came out. Great novelty, especially asking it for jokes.

When otherwise smart people do seemingly dumb things, you have to ask if there is some rational explanation for the behavior. My take, having experienced everything you describe here, is that from upper management's position, each of these new shiny objects is a bet. Maybe it'll work out (networking, internet, cloud) or it'll go bust (push, blockchain, etc).

If it works out, the company gets to ride a new tech wave while avoiding obsolescence (see Yahoo, DEC, Sun, etc). If it doesn't pan out, the company writes off the investment and moves on to the next shiny thing.

From the leadership perspective, it actually makes sense to jump on the latest shiny thing. From the mid-level manager's perspective, it sucks to be the one who has to go make sense of it.

All aboard the Zeitgeist Express, next stop Adrenalineville!

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